THE STILL
On their first date, they attend a socially distanced rooftop gala in flapper wear. It’s New Year’s Eve, 2021, Brooklyn. Martha is a pale brunette. Marty is Mexican. She wears a mesh deco dress and T-strap heels, while he’s in a tuxedo, classic and suave, going for a look he calls Tijuana James Bond. In real life, she is a doctor and he is a writer/bartender or a bartender/writer, depending on how you feel about the relationship between hopes and finances. Masks required and drunk on gin, the couple slips off to an alleyway, making out with cotton prophylactics just as snow begins to fall, thunder cracks, lightning strikes.
***
After she finishes her residency, they get a quickie courthouse wedding and then camp in New Hampshire for their honeymoon. They hike trails bracketed by pines and maples. She smells of Dove soap. He stinks of 100 proof bug spray.
It is 2023 and Zika has mutated, strengthening, infecting one breed of mosquito after another, pushing up the East Coast, closing in on them like a storm. His phone chimes with CDC updates. He gives up gin because he hears it attracts mosquitos.
“We should move to Canada,” he says. “Fewer bugs.”
“I’ll think about it.” But she never does.
***
Martha takes a position at a children’s hospital in Dallas. Birth rates are declining. Daycares close down, schools worry they’ll have to lay off teachers when the “lost generation” comes of age. Marty wants to wait for children, so they get a dog, but Martha is 32 so she throws away her birth control pills. Resigned to fatherhood, Marty sprays the yard with enough pesticide to put down a moose, buys a canopy bed equipped with mosquito netting, and chastises her for not wearing long sleeves.
“It’s 95 in the shade,” she says. “Heatstroke is the bigger worry.”
“Do you want our baby to look like a Lego character?”
“Stop talking,” she says, “because you’re stressing the fuck out of the fetus.”
Their daughter—Myrna—comes out with all her fingers and all her toes and a normal shaped head.
***
In May of 2028, Marty publishes his first novel, Love Labour’s Larvae, a post-apocalyptic literary exploration of hybridized mosquitos that become immune to pesticides and exterminate everyone with blood type B. In The New Yorker, James Wood calls it “a brilliant exploration of our environmental conflicts, the hegemonic insect forces ravaging us, tinged with a subtle yet innate eroticism.” Money pours in, or at least the kind of money that finds its way into the coffers of middlebrow literary novelists. Martha, however, finds the story sentimental and the sex scenes lacking foreplay.
“It’s just a lot of pounding,” she confesses to a coworker.
***
When 2031 arrives, Marty catches malaria, but so does Myrna. From his sickbed, between fever dreams, he gloats.
“We should have gone to Canada,” he says.
This annoys her to no end. Not the malaria, just him being right. For the malaria, she has nothing but dread. Myrna ends up intubated, tubes winding out of her mouth, her arms. Thousands of children die, but Myrna pulls through and is discharged the same day a job opens in Minneapolis.
***
In 2034, Myrna comes home from school talking about the “old world vs. the new world.” In the mudroom, she strips off her mosquito netting, her mask, her latex gloves. At night, she watches videos of children playing soccer outside.
“This is a new epoch,” she says. “Like when the dinosaurs died.”
“It’s the same world, sweetie,” Martha says. “Just hotter and buggier.”
***
In 2036, Marty quits writing. He spends work hours on the Internet, which, because of the brownouts, is nothing more than dial up, the familiar tenor of the 90s introduced to a new generation, the glacial loading of web pages a Zen-like exercise in patience. He tracks the rise of sea temperatures, the slow, northbound trek of certain mosquitos, of specific diseases. His muse is rage and his medium the online message board.
“What do you do all day?” she asks.
“Fight the good fight.”
He says this without irony to a woman in a white lab coat just off a double in a hospital that is constantly running out of beds for the sick and slabs for the dead.
***
By 2044, the population of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area is 19 million people, mostly refugees from the American South, people who complain about the dearth of barbeque, the strict gun regulations, and the lack of Baptist churches, all of which test the notion of “Minnesota nice” like never before.
Myrna attends the University of Alaska, Anchorage, the Harvard of the Arctic, since the actual Harvard has become an online university, a rival to the University of Phoenix, which is of course a misnomer, since no one lives in Phoenix anymore, not since the drought in 2038 dried up all the swimming pools, shut off all of the air conditioners.
This is when the Entomologist makes his appearance.
His name is Brody and he is a 29-year-old graduate student, an entomologist-in-training, something she’d rather not consider. Brody is sinewy and unafraid. He finds a ladybug on the hotel nightstand, shows it to her. She is draped in a sheet, very PG-13-like.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” he says, holding out the ladybug. “Like nature conspires to show us that hope is at the heart of evolution.”
Brody is emotionally simple but aesthetically pleasing, and, most importantly, lacks any paranoia. On his right buttock, he has a tattoo of a penguin, a reminder of an extinct species, to carry on its memory.
Martha confuses entomology, the study of insects, with etymology, the origin of words.
“Entomology comes from the Greek word ‘entom’ for insect,” Brody says. “Socrates loved nature. All of it was equal in his eyes.”
Martha isn’t sure that’s true, but they make love again and then watch the news. Florida has been reverted from state to wildlife refuge. In Louisiana, the Nile crocodile has eaten a pack of swamp men, guys who never left after the evacuation, choosing to subsist like Kevin Costner in Waterworld. Meanwhile in Texas, a Burmese Python inhabits the dome of the abandoned state capital. His name is Ralph and he is 27 feet long and swallows rabid armadillos without chewing.
She talks of leaving Marty. Brody smiles like he understands, cupping her breast and telling her, “It’ll work out in the end. Karma.”
***
In 2048, Brody dies from a tick bite and Minneapolis is abandoned after a bout of Yellow Fever kills 150,000 people. Martha and Marty trek north to Thompson, Manitoba, a Canadian boomtown of 13 million refugees. Martha is hired as chief resident at Saint Roch Catholic Hospital, while Marty searches fruitlessly for a wifi connection.
“You’ve got no electricity. You don’t write. Are you going to do something useful or just die here?”
Marty says nothing.
***
It is the Internet going black that saves him. Sure, there remain a few government websites and a lifetime’s worth of Armageddon-themed pornography (The Four Horsemen of the A-cock-alypse) but it is nothing like the labyrinth of paranoia and hatred of yore. His comrades from the message boards, the avatars of his daily experience, have all disappeared. Myrna pities him and Martha loathes him. He is in Canada, his longtime wish come true, but the endless, screenless hours spreading out before him leave him without purpose. He wanders town, tracing the walls of the camp, running his fingers along the corrugated metal, occasionally poking himself with the razor wire, before finding his way home, where he stares out the window like a man with sleeping sickness. He tests the strength of his belt. There is an exposed water pipe that looks sturdy, but he fears his weight will break it and he will still be alive but without running water.
Then one day, his pondering gets him lost until he finds himself in front of a lending library. Canada may no longer be a socialist paradise, with the provincial system replaced by a series of quasi-sheikdoms that resemble the old Ottoman Empire, but the nation’s essential belief in civility remains. He sifts through fiction, looking for his own book, of course, but when he does not find it, he searches history, drama, and biology. Nothing of interest. He stops at the self-help section. He does not want to learn piano or become a professional blackjack player, but there is one book that sticks out.
When he reaches home, Martha is bathing herself over a bucket. She is still lovely, grayed of course, but beautiful, lacking the pox scars that have ravaged so many bodies. He loves her and wishes for nothing more than that love to be returned.
“I’ve found my calling,” he says.
“Yeah, what is it? I’m waiting with bated breath.”
He takes a moment, composes himself. Her doubt is understandable.
“Well,” he begins, “it’s a still. I’m going to build a still.”
“A what?”
“I’m going to make bootleg alcohol.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
But build a still he does. He scrounges the tub and the piping and ingredients—juniper is surprisingly easy to come across—and although his first few attempts end up scorching the back of his throat, by the end of arctic summer he concocts a recipe that reminds him of his youth, bitter and sweet and sharp.
He wants to show Martha, but she has gone off to the bush to treat the Carrier cult, a people who worship William Carrier, the inventor of the air conditioner. During Sunday services, they bow down to an altar of a broken Honeywell and chant, “May the cold air return.”
So, instead, he sets up a liquor stand in Mitchell Square. Think Lucy’s psychiatric practice with moonshine. For a shot of gin, he charges two Swedish Kronas, for that is the universal currency of the new world, as Sweden has become the Rome of our times. But there are no takers. Children throw rocks at him. Women laugh at the great doctor’s fool husband. But eventually an old grizzled man, hunched and stinking of moose bacon, offers a pair of coins.
“I’ll give it a try, sonny boy.”
***
Martha flies to Anchorage to see Myrna, who is married to three men, as is the custom in the Free Republic of Alaska. She is the nation’s poet laureate, holds an endowed chair at the University, and keeps a flock of reindeer on her ranch.
“I think I’m leaving your father,” Martha says.
“Don’t,” Myrna says. “Just get another husband. Don’t be so old fashioned.”
But Martha’s mind is made up.
When she returns home, Marty is out, though she can’t imagine where.
In her steamer trunk, she finds old photographs of when they were young, a print from New Hampshire on their honeymoon, a snapshot of them dressed to the nines on that New Year’s Eve so long ago. She pockets them but little else.
She takes one last look at her living room, which is also her bedroom, before a rattling sends her to the door. There stands a flaxen haired boy with a key.
“Where did you get that?”
“The Master gave it to me, missus. He forgot his glasses and asked me to fetch them.”
The boy speaks like Oliver Twist but is so confident in his actions that she allows him to pass to the bureau, where he grabs Marty’s old reading glasses from the place where he always leaves them.
“Where’s my husband?”
“At The Speak of course. Wherever else should he be?”
She follows the boy down MacLeod Street with its rope makers and pipefitters and glass blowers and then stops outside of an old garage teeming with a motley bunch laughing and toasting and seeming to be celebrating something though there is no holiday. She can’t remember the last time she saw so many so happy. She recognizes other doctors and nurses, along with coal miners and police officers and teachers and seamstresses and blacksmiths and candlemakers. The whole of Thompson society, the reputable and disreputable, is here, unbroken, a community, a civilization reborn.
And, finally, at the heart of the crowd, there he is, behind a long table, bottles before him, working. There’s her Marty, bartending like the old days, pouring shots and telling lies. He looks nothing like that Tijuana James Bond she fell in love with, but he doesn’t look pathetic either. No, there’s a flush in his cheeks, a light in his eyes.
“Marty,” she says.
He sees her and finds himself afraid. What will she think? He takes a drink from a clay cup and then pours her one.
“It’s a martini,” he says. “Dry. Super dry. Really it’s just warm gin. Vermouth is really hard to make without grapes.”
Then as a man prone to gesture, he makes one.
He yells for the crowd to quiet, and then, with the authority of a man at the center of this community, announces, “Now my friends, if I may propose a little toast. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
Martha remembers the old world, all that was lost and all who are gone. But there is still this bar, this man. That can be enough. She takes his hand and kisses it.
“We should get a dog,” she says. “Have adventures.”
“Anything you want, darling.”
***
Michael Keenan Gutierrez is the author of The Trench Angel (Leapfrog 2015) He lives in Chapel Hill where he teaches at the University of North Carolina.
